Meta

I have way too much stone for me to ever work on all of it. I would like to trade what I have for something I have never worked on before. For some reason, Copralite sounds like the shit and I’d like to make a sphere out of it for the novelty. So if you have some Copralite or something else crazy, beautiful or just plain unordinary, I’d love to trade if you see something you’d like to have in the pictures.

What I have. I have a ton of Michigan slag in blue, green, grey, and black and anything in between. I have an abundance of Florida agatized coral, including rocks, chunks, chips and display type specimens. A couple of them are geodes. I have a ton of Lake Michigan beach rock including about every color and kind imaginable and cut scraps from spheres I have made (great for tumbling, crafts, etc). I have a 5 gallon bucket of Petoskey stones. A couple nice pieces of Picasso Marble enough for many many cabs. Some small to medium sized carnelian from Washington state. Quite a few Michigan Septarians (clay rock/calcite).

If you see something you’d like feel free to contact me. I’m mainly looking for small to medium rocks large enough to make a sphere or marble in the 1.5 – 4 inch range. I don’t have a large saw so I can’t really handle much bigger than that for now. If an item gets traded, I’ll take down the photo.

***update 3-28-12***: Petoskeys, Septarians, and Picasso Marble are gone. I’ll have more Petoskeys and Septarians by summers end!

I flew my family down to Dunedin, Florida to stay with my folks. They are retired and live in a condo on the causeway to Honeymoon Island State Park, in Dunedin Florida. It is located on the Gulf Coast west of Tampa. I had been there before and I would wake up early every morning and go shelling on the north beach. Its great exercise and probably about a 4 mile hike to the northern most point and back. This year, I had read somewhere about Honeymoon Island being a great place for agatized coral. I had not heard about this before and was anxious to try my hand at finding some. My oldest son is 10 years old and loves rock hounding just about as much as me or more. Plus he has a great eye. We were there for a full 7 days and hit the beach every morning all but one day. We would bring a five gallon bucket and a hammer. I must admit my son found the best pieces of agatized coral. I am certainly no expert on this type of stone, but we sure found a lot of it. For those who may wish to visit this beautiful island and give the rockhounding a shot, we hit the northern most parking lot/beach and worked our way south from the bathroom building. We experienced much success. I believe you will agree we found a fair amount of agatized coral. I shipped back roughly 100 pounds of it (Cost me less than $50!). In addition to the obvious coral pieces there is an abundance of black agate or I heard it may be a form of chert. I have no experience with this but it looks like it will make fantastic spheres/jewelry. I heard some people do knapping with it. I found one large polka dotted rock (maybe an 8-10 pounder) I believe to be agatized coral. The hammer we brought to the beach came in handy and we dropped some whoop-ass on quite a few rocks finding partial and full geodes in the process. If someone can tell me more about these specimens I would love to hear from you. I haven’t found too much information online so far.

Well we have had some pretty unusually warm weather here in Michigan this winter. A couple weeks ago, the weather jumped close to 50 degrees and sunny. I had heard about a park on Lake Michigan in South Haven that was a good place to look for Michigan septarians. Septarians are made of an argillaceous (clay-rich# carbonate, predominantly. The outside gets “case-hardened” by chemical desiccation while the inside dries out, which forms the distinctive cracks. The cracks then fill in with carbonate or silica rich groundwater which allows crystals to precipitate out of solution and fill the cracks). I jumped at the chance to get outside and had an incredibly beautiful day there. The only drawback was the forecast for 7-15 foot waves! Well, when I got there it was windy, the waves were big, but nothing like predicted. I wore my knee high boots but still managed to catch a rogue wave splashing me from the crotch down and into my boots. I stayed a good hour and a half before leaving. My pant leg was still soaked as I left and made my way to the Saugatuck Brewery for three pints and a perch sandwich. It looked like I had pissed my pants when I walked in…but no one said anything (I imagine they may have a few leave like that once in awhile, but rarely come in like that!). My thirst quenched, I headed home. I will be back in the spring I imagine….or maybe sooner (damn, that beer was good!).

I did manage to find quite a few septarians, along with some beautiful unknown rocks and quite a bit of large slag. I also found my first Michigan Hematite. Enjoy the pix!

I braved a winter storm a couple days ago and drove from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Bancroft, Michigan some 90 miles away to attend an Estate sale. It was near white out conditions in spots but I got there in one piece. And man, was I glad I did. The gentleman who had passed away was an avid rock hound and had a basement, garage and outbuilding full of various rocks, gems, glass, and machinery. I would have loved to have known that man as I’m sure he could have taught me a lot and had some great tales of adventure to share. I got some great deals and would have bought more but one guy in particular (probly some sort of ebay re-seller) picked up damn near everything he could get his mitts on. Luckily I was able to grab a few prizes for myself. The only bummer of the morning was I missed out on some huge Petoskey stones as I mistakenly believed they would take credit cards and had to run to the bank for some quick cash. Anyway, as always, I’ve included plenty of pictures of my purchases. I paid $124 for all the rocks and some small pieces of glass cullet. The rest of the glass in the pictures came from another source recently and I paid another $120 for those (including shipping). If you know what some of the proper names of the rocks are pictured below that I don’t have properly labeled feel free to comment or drop me a private message.

Stay tuned as I’ll be cutting these up soon and be making some spheres and things!